Walking-Stick Papers eBook

The Colonel mopped his brow with a large bandanna
handkerchief. “Sir,” he resumed,
“obnoxious as it is to a sensible man to do so,
let us glance at the hero type of the most popular
recent novels by women, the figure which strikes admiration
into the feminine soul. Now,” he roared
(and I declare, my hair rose on end), “the most
awful thing any nigger can call another is a ‘nigger.’
So we all rebel against what we feel to be the weaknesses
of our own position. None so quick as the vulgar
to denounce ‘no gentleman.’ And so
on. Thus, as we see, there is nothing the weaker
sex so much despises in a man as weakness of character,
and, as is consistent with all such reactions of feeling,
nothing which so much attracts it as a firmness and
strength of will beyond itself. Naturally, the
adored figures in the popular women’s fiction
are always of the ‘strong man’ type, in
feminine eyes. And here we come to a most extraordinary
obliquity of the feminine eye.

“What,” he demanded, “are the marks
by which you are to know a ’strong man’—­in
the feminine picture? A strong man, of course,
is a man with the bark on; polish is incompatible
with rugged strength. An exhilarating air of
brusqueness breathes from all strong men. They
are as ignorant of manners as they are of the effete
conventions of grammar. They have fought their
way up, and no one can down them. They can be
depended upon absolutely as what are called ’good
providers.’ In short, by the written confession
of her heart, woman’s idea of a ‘dear,’
after several centuries more or less of civilisation,
remains precisely the primitive conception that it
was in the days when man wooed her by grabbing her
by the hair and handing her one with a club.”

The Colonel was breathing heavily with the exertion
of animated speech as he added: “In real
life a man of any stability of judgment would be decidedly
suspicious of the hero of a modern woman’s novel
if one should walk into his office, or, doubtless,
he would observe this whimsical caricature with something
of the amusement he would find in the ludicrously
false comic Irishman of the vaudeville stage.
This irreverent flight of fancy on our part, however,
is yanking the strong man from his appropriate and
supporting setting, where paste is given the glow
of an authentic stone; in the sympathetic pages created
by feminine intuition he dominates the machine.
When the heroine takes into her own hands the right
of the individual to a second chance for happiness,”
the Colonel declaimed with a demoniac grin, “she
turns to experience with such a one perfect love,
as the honoured wife of a splendid and prosperous
man and the mother of beautiful children.